“Do I seem like I smoke marijuana?"

 

This was how the Prime Minister of Canada, Mr Stephen Harper, responded when asked by a journalist whether or not he had ever smoked pot. The question came up because a number of other high-profile Canadian politicos have been confessing all over the place to having tried the weed.

Politicians who admit involvement with pot come in all shapes, sizes and genders, so the Prime Minister’s looks are not a reliable guide as to whether he indulges or not. In any case, the admission of pot-smoking by anyone seeking or occupying high office is, commonly, a well-crafted PR event, with the respondent being careful to say only that they merely “try” the substance. I suppose the use of the verb “to try” takes the edge off the perceived misdemeanour somewhat: Pot light, so to speak. Very few actually say they smoke it, implying that their engagement is that of a dilettante who wishes merely to investigate the substance’s possibilities. The hearer is left to flounder in a sea of ambiguity as to what is meant by “trying”; whether it means merely taking a puff (without inhaling), or inhaling (perhaps only shallowly), or going all the way and taking a reckless, deep, no-holds-barred drag that allows full exchange of the weed’s vaporous  ingredients with the blood circulating within the lungs.

Using or trying or smoking, according to the degree of ambiguity in the confession, can be casual, occasional, regular or even “all the time,” as the city of Toronto’s mayor, Rob Ford admitted on camera recently.

            Of course, in today’s Canada, the debate really is not whether a Prime Minister or wannabe Prime Minister or a colourful city mayor smokes a joint. The more serious issue is whether laws prohibiting smoking and/or possession for personal use should be repealed. Repeal would undoubtedly relieve the law-enforcement authorities of policing these relatively minor infractions and could perhaps, ultimately, render traffickers obsolete.

            For many, however, legalizing pot could be a step too far, the beginning of the slide toward legalization of “harder” drugs. On the other hand, fall-out from legalizing the hard drugs might be much more benign than doomsters suppose, considering that a major consequence of the legal prohibition of hard drugs, as well as of marijuana, is fostering the creation and maintenance of criminal cartels that cause more harm to individual lives and to society than the drugs themselves.

            Troublesome and complex, no doubt, but these are issues that need thorough debate if we are to achieve best solutions.

Tell Fren Tru

PS: As I finish writing this post, I hear that police in Toronto have been busy raiding a grow-op planted within innocent-looking corn-rows in a farmer’s field in the northern suburbs. The street value of the 600 plants confiscated was an estimated $2m. Meanwhile, the state of Washington in America is writing rules regulating the location of outlets out of which pot can be legally sold in the state.

Hewing Wood and Drawing Water Young

This business about child labour is troublesome. A regular West Africa correspondent for the BBC looked into the matter recently and declared herself quite unable to draw the line between teaching a child the skills of life on the one hand and on the other, avoiding abuse in the child who does work:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-23332948

No doubt, many countries have come a long way since dark satanic mills blighted lives, including those of children in the now well-developed countries. But it must be difficult to preach the gospel of a labour-free childhood to the peasant living today in his or her African village and convince them of the evils of making their able-bodied child toil, fetch and carry when there is no other way in which food or water and other commodities can be delivered into the home. Indeed, such parents may be struggling mightily to provide the wherewithal of life, sustained by nothing more than the hope that when they are gone, their children would have acquired the skills by which to do likewise for their own.  

            I myself, at a tender age, had to fetch water, pound rice and even turn a cauldron or two of foo-foo meal over an open fire. And indeed, this was almost universally the case for those of my generation in many other families. Looking back, few of us have had any reason to regret or wish our life had been otherwise.

            Twenty-thirteen is of course another time altogether, and all of us now expect higher standards in our societies, whether in Africa or elsewhere. But how do you free children from the bondage of living within an impoverished community where existence may still be just a hand-to-mouth one? I think we all know the answer, which is that every child must be able to go to school, where he or she is taught by competent, knowledgeable and empathetic teachers.

That is one of the millennial challenges. Any takers?  

Tell Fren Tru

Tuskegee North: Canada Matches America

Returning to Toronto a week ago we walked right into a raging storm. Though it had nothing to do with weather, it was a storm that created considerable turbulence, nevertheless. The disturbance came out of the dusty corners of academic research located within a Canadian university department of history. Results of this research were published recently in the journal, Social History in a paper entitled “Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942–1952”

The author, Ian Mosby, was a postdoctoral student when he went through records of the Canadian scientific and administrative elite of the era and discovered how they were trying out ideas on the treatment of malnutrition in Aboriginal children held captive in so-called residential schools. Children attending the schools were kept on a starvation diet of poor nutritional quality and ended up being severely malnourished. The scientists, doctors, nurses, anthropologists, etc saw these children as an opportunity to advance their careers, subjecting the starving children to controlled experiments in which one group was given nutritional supplements whilst another was maintained only on the starvation diet that had caused them to be malnourished in the first place. And all this was done neither with the consent of the parents nor the agreement of the experimental subjects themselves, and ignoring the risk of potential injury to them. To add to the indignities and anguish of the defenceless children, the researchers undertook detailed physical examinations and blood sampling procedures that were obviously painful.

Curiously, all this was taking place at the same time that the infamous Tuskegee experiment was in full swing in America. That project, undertaken by the United States Public Health Service, had as its aim, determining the natural history of untreated syphilis among African-American men in Alabama at a time when treatment for the disease was already available.

In circumstances like this, it may be difficult to distinguish Canadian social policies towards its subject population from the Americans’ to theirs. Nor can it be easy to distinguish those of colonial Britain in Africa who, as far as I can recall, sought neither the consent of my parents nor my prior agreement when they descended on my village in the late 1940’s to test its children for malaria parasites (I think) in our infant school. All I can remember is the terror that we felt when the bowl-hatted characters arrived at the school, lancets drawn, to administer punctures and squeeze blood out of our little fingers. The general weeping and wailing that accompanied this assault on our persons remains permanently imprinted on the memory.

And I still feel the pain.

Tell Fren Tru